The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday – June 12, 2011
Well, we’ve already done some special things this morning (not that we haven’t done them or things like them before on this day)—like trying to suggest what “a mighty wind” might have sounded like (assuming you could get the CD player to start up on cue!) and releasing a bevy of balloons over the congregation; one year I remember we had the kids recreate the moment in John’s Gospel when Jesus “breathed on them” to receive the Holy Spirit by blowing bubbles—we do things like this because this is the Fiftieth Day of Easter, the Day of Pentecost.
And we’re going to do a few more special things today because the Day of Pentecost is one of the four major feast days when it is especially appropriate to participate in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, and we just happen to have a candidate!
Otherwise, we’d be limiting ourselves to the renewal of our baptismal vows this morning, as we did seven weeks ago.
(Oh, yes. This is also the Sunday that has been chosen for the people of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and me to give thanks for the ministry we’ve shared for the past twenty-three and a half years.)
But first things first.
Why do we baptize?
That used to be a fairly easy question to answer: because it’s a sacrament and sacraments are what the Church does.
But times have changed, and with the times practices in the Church are changing.
For some time now, thankfully, we have made it a point to shy away from the notion that baptism is some sort of insurance policy that protects the recipient from eternal damnation, and we have found ourselves emphasizing the importance of commitment to a community we know as the Body of Christ.
Infants and young children are baptized with the understanding that their parents and godparents, assisted by the entire congregation, will see to it that they are “brought up in the Christian faith and life” and encouraged as they mature to assume more and more personal responsibility for the vows that were made on their behalf.
The rite of Confirmation, once tied to the age we were willing to allow our children to be included at the Lord’s Table, has become the way we signal that those who were baptized as children have indeed reached the point where they fully accept the responsibility for their growth in the Faith.
We have pretty much established that the sacrament of Holy Baptism at no matter what age constitutes full membership in the Church and have embraced the model of Christian nurture and formation as the norm.
But where does that leave the seeker after truth?
More and more Episcopal congregations are experiencing the tension between the need to respect canonical restrictions and a desire to be even more inclusive at the Lord’s Table, as was our Lord himself.
How do we respond to those we sense may have come to our doors seeking a deeper relationship with God and who may feel drawn by the love of Christ?
Do we invite them to join us at the Lord’s Table or do we inform them that there are conditions they must meet before they can be welcomed into fellowship?
Even more important: How do we respond to those who we sense have a desire to serve and to learn while they are offering service?
Do we gratefully honor their willingness to serve or do we insist that get a membership card before we will accept their help?
If I have established that there may be more questions than there are answers about baptism, then I have accomplished what I set out to do.
Have I satisfactorily explained how we can put in the bulletin (because it’s the way we have always phrased it) “Today we welcome Logan Tucker Beck into the Body of Christ through the sacrament of Holy Baptism” and how we can say to Logan, as we will be saying together shortly, “We receive you into the household of God”, when quite a few of us, if not all of us, have considered him a member of our fellowship already, especially since he has been serving so faithfully as a senior acolyte for some time now?
Probably not.
Sometimes words that tradition sticks us with no longer quite fit our needs.
Many of us have already come to terms with that conclusion while negotiating the saying of the Creeds as a congregation who believe in the same God, but may have different ideas about who God is and what God does; we’ll be involved in similar negotiations in a few moments when we join with Logan in “renewing our own baptismal covenant”.
And, as I mentioned to Logan, during a conversation we had last week, he will have three opportunities to renounce the powers of evil not because “three is a charm” or because there are necessarily three kinds of evil, but because thinking people have done their best to explain the reasons for the existence of evil in so many different ways and the liturgy does its best to summarize them in three questions, to which Logan will be asked to respond.
The next three questions he will be asked to respond to are, of course, a lot more important: “Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior? Do your put your whole trust in his grace and love? Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?”
Logan, my brother in Christ, you will be expected to respond to each of those questions with two simple words: “I do.”
But you will be obliged to wrestle with the implications of those questions, as I know you have already, not to mention the implications of your answer, for the rest of your life and beyond.
And that’s OK because God has given you all the room you need to do your wrestling, and if you think you need more, God will give you more.
You will have all the room you need.
That’s the kind of God you’re saying “yes” to today.
“Yes” is, after all, pretty much the only answer honest seekers can come up with, when they discover that the God they have been seeking a deeper relationship with has been seeking them for at least as long a time or longer.
Logan, my brother, I trust you realize what a gift you have given this congregation in your decision to be baptized, to say “yes” to God, on this particular day; it will allow all of us to share in the celebration of your baptism in a very special way, a time-honored way in the Church, though a way quite a few of us may never have experienced before.
[Note: The members of the congregation were ceremonially aspersed with the baptismal water following Logan’s baptism.]
And I trust you realize what a gift you have given me, your pastor for a short time yet, but always your friend—one last opportunity to invite the good people of God in St. Andrew’s, as well as the members of my family and so many friends who have joined us in worship this morning, to reflect on the mission and ministry our baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ calls us to.
You could not have picked a more appropriate Sunday to be baptized, the Sunday when Christians all over the world celebrate the fulfillment of Christ’s promise: the descent of God’s Holy Spirit upon the apostles and their friends in that upper room, but, far more to the point, the reality of the Spirit’s enduring presence within us and among us, even and especially in this day and age—the gift of God’s Holy Spirit—given to enlighten us, to inspire us, to strengthen us for ministry in this world, wherever God may choose to send us.
Share